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Dessert

Lemon Meringue Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, butter, sugar, eggs, lemon, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Meringue Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding base

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk.

  2. Mix the beaten egg yolks with the butter and sugar until creamy. Add the lemon juice and grated rind to the mixture.

  3. Combine the soaked bread with the mixture and pour into a buttered dish.

Bake and top

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until firm and slightly brown. Remove the pudding from the oven.

  2. Make the meringue by beating egg whites with powdered sugar and a little lemon juice. Top the pudding with the meringue.

  3. Brown the meringue slightly.

  4. Let the pudding cool before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard base, while whipped whites form the light meringue topping.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that sets with the eggs into a creamy custard.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the base.
White sugar
Sweetens the base and helps keep the custard tender.
Lemon
Its juice and rind add acidity and bright lemon aroma to the pudding.

The step that matters

Let the pudding cool before serving. Cooling lets the egg-thickened custard finish setting so it cuts cleanly and does not run or weep when served.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, butter, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, butter, sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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